IT Hiccups of the Week: Rough Start for NYC's New 911 System

Yet another quiet week in the land of IT snafus. The most interesting story to crop up involved the problems plaguing the roll out of the New York City Police Department’s new emergency 911 dispatch system.

New York City’s New Emergency Dispatch System Fails 4 Times in First 48 hours

The dispatch system first went out Wednesday afternoon for 16 minutes beginning at 4:21 pm, the New York Daily News reported. Emergency service operators had to revert to capturing the call information on slips of paper, which were then taken by runners to the separate NYPD and EMS radio rooms where the proper emergency units could be assigned to the call. The scene was described by one experienced operator as sheer “pandemonium.”

A City Hall spokesman down played the incident, saying that the manual back-up system worked and that no calls were missed.

Then, early Thursday morning, the dispatch system suffered a six minute outage, said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in an interview with CBS News New York. Kelly also felt the need to note that the new system had been “tested for six months.”

I am not sure whether Kelly was trying to vouch for the dispatch system’s reliability, but if he was, his efforts were soon undone. Shortly after Kelley's morning interview, the dispatch system went out again, at 12:09 pm. That time, the outage went on intermittently for about an hour, the Daily News once more reported. Out came the paper, pens, and runners again.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg shrugged off all the outages, saying that, “There are a few bugs in the system. We'll fix them and there'll be more. Every computer system has bugs in it; there's none that does not.”

At least there have been no reported outages the past three days. But if another one happens, at least the emergency dispatch system operators have now had plenty of practice in how to deal with it.

New York City Bike Share Program Has Intermittent Problems

New York City earned a twofer last week when software problems were reported in its new, ballyhooed but controversialCiti Bike Share program. The program was finally launched after a year’s delay because of “software issues.” These included a lawsuit or two among the developers of the software that “controls everything from Internet bookings and payment mechanisms, to the hundreds of solar-powered docking stations, to the Global Positioning System that tracks and monitors inventory," a story last year in the Villager reported.

You may recall from last week’s IT Hiccups post that the Royal Bank of Scotland suffered (yet another) embarrassing IT-related outage just two weeks ago. That one kept 2 million of its customers from logging into the bank’s mobile banking app.

The most recent problem prevented customers from ever reaching the log-in stage; the mobile app failed to load up properly on customers’ mobile phones, the Telegraph said. The problem lasted about an hour before it was fixed.

RBS, which has plenty of practice, apologized once again “for the inconvenience caused.”

Maybe RBS should just follow New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s lead and simply announce to its customers that all of the bugs they henceforth experience are considered to be normal system behavior, and to expect more of them soon. So be calm, and carry on.